Blackfish City(42)
Context: The breaks were a welcome distraction from the city’s fundamental flaws—the supremacy of property, the fact that landlords ran everything.
Ankit laughed out loud and leaped to the next stilt.
The place was a reasonable facsimile. She could see why people paid for it. But it only made her hungrier for the real thing. The bite of metal. The dark void below. The cold wind, most of all. A scaler friend of hers, quoting some old proverb: If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.
Soq
The boat was old, late or maybe even mid-twentieth century, tall and rusted, with a steep steel gangplank. Soq was out of breath by the time they reached the top. They turned to take in the view. Like most Qaanaaq urchins, Soq had marveled at the Amonrattanakosin flagship, lingered on the wharf where it was anchored, imagined the torture chambers and disruptor manufacturing facilities that must be belowdecks, the meeting rooms where criminals from every rung of the ladder met to plan out operations, the storerooms full of grain and cans for surviving sieges by the forces of Safety or enemy crime bosses or the military of one or more of the charter nations.
It seemed smaller now. Soq reached out to rub two fingers against the hull, watched rust flakes fall. When Dao had buzzed Soq that morning, told Soq to report to the ship, it had turned the whole day into a dream.
“Utterly unseaworthy,” Go said.
Soq nodded. “Why don’t you . . . I don’t know, paint it? Indonesia still makes that hydrophobic stuff . . .”
“This is just a starting place.” Go stepped off the gangplank. “Hello, Soq.”
“Hi.”
They shook hands. It felt weird. Soq had dreamed of meeting Go. And now: there they were. The real thing was so much smaller than the mythic creature in Soq’s head.
The city was hard to see, below them in the ebbing twilight. And the boat moved differently, its rocking more noticeable than the city’s eternal rise and fall, which was mitigated by complex mechanics . . . Soq so rarely stepped off the grid. They paused to savor the almost-seasickness.
“People live here?” Soq asked.
“People do,” Go said. “But you don’t. Not yet, anyway. Your home for the foreseeable future is actually part of your first assignment.”
Three women squatted on the deck, slowly deconstructing a large plastic cube. Pulling away smaller plastic cubes of varying sizes, one at a time, and slotting them into canvas bins based on their color.
“What’s in those?” Soq asked. “Or is that the kind of thing you need to be here a lot longer before you can find out?”
Go laughed. “We’re not just drug runners here. Most of our work is totally legal. This shipping pallet contains spices, just arrived from the subcontinent. By letting so-called crime bosses control even the most mundane and legitimate aspects of Qaanaaq’s commerce, the city can keep expenses down. Particularly labor costs.”
“So I take it these women don’t have a union?”
“They do not. Although you are welcome to ask them how happy they are with their work and their pay.”
Soq watched one of them until she made eye contact. She smiled, nodded. A recent arrival from somewhere post-post-Soviet. Of course they were happy. Go was probably light-years ahead of every other option this woman had for making a living in the nightmare landscape she came from, or the city where there were thousands of smarter, more desperate women just like her.
The tour took a surprisingly long time. The boat had more levels than Soq had been imagining, each one with its own complex labyrinth of passageways and warrens and boxes and drawers. Go had her fingers in so many different things. A whole department dedicated to intelligence, files and photos and film on probably half the city, one person whose only job was mastering archaic media, flash drives and paper files and floppy disks and microfiche and crystal gel, cataloging what they kept and retrieving information from them when needed. Elsewhere, a lithe legless woman was lord and commander of a vast pharmaceutical storage system, swinging from rope to rope through a forest of cabinets.
“You give every new grid-grunt flunky the full tour yourself?” Soq asked.
“No,” Go said, but did not say anything else.
Back up top, she handed Soq an armband. Leather, black, embossed with an incongruous toile print. A pastoral French peasant scene. Go said, “When she was grooming me to take her place, my mentor once told me that ambition is essential to being an underling, but death to a crime lord. That we will flourish and thrive for precisely as long as we remain content with where we are, what we have. And when we try to reach further, seize more, that’s when we run into problems. That’s how wars start, how empires topple.”
Soq smiled, because it was easy to see where this was going. “But you’re not content with what you have.”
“No.”
“Your mentor sounds like a pretty smart lady.”
“She was pretty smart. But she thought small. And maybe she was wrong. Maybe that’s one of those pieces of received wisdom that everyone just accepts, even when it keeps them trapped in one place.”
“One way to find out,” Soq said, looking out at the city lights. The wind was picking up. Waves crashed against the side of the boat beneath them. This is what it feels like. To step outside your box. To shake your fist at the city and say, You will not break me. I’ll break you, if that’s what it comes to.